Saturday, 14 January 2012

No matter how fervently I talk about sleep being such a huge waste of time, sometimes I do need that long peaceful twelve hours of sleep. And what I really mean by sleep being a waste of time is when I find myself sleeping during the day thinking I’ll be fresh and be able to work efficiently afterwards. But the result is rarely that. I end up feeling all groggy and unproductive for many hours after I wake up. So that, clearly, is a humongous waste pile of unproductive hours I could have spent watching episodes from The Big Bang Theory, or Yes Prime Minister.

So I slept for twelve hours last night – 10pm to 10am. I woke up, very fresh, had breakfast and went for my regular weekend morning walk. The weather was just perfect. It was cold and sunny at the same time. Absolutely wonderful. During the walk, I listened to Dennis Dalton’s lecture on Political Theory. And then I listened to Richard Feynman’s lecture on Physics. The contrast was intriguing, yet they didn’t seem too far apart either. There’s a thin thread connecting the two. And then I thought about the course I was studying here at MDI. And I wondered, surely there’s so much more to life than to learn how to “generate revenue”, or “strategize” to generate the most revenue. So what exactly am I learning here? Am I really learning business management? Honestly, it seems like I’m learning more about people management than business management. I’m not sure if my friends pursing an M.Tech/M.S. have similar experiences, but I have enough reasons to believe that life of an MBA student is very different from the life of an M.Tech/M.S. student.

I was told before I came here that I would meet all kinds of people here. And I thought that these so-called “all kinds” would be a small percentage. I was so mistaken. The small percentage actually constitutes the normal people who behave like er... normal people. And the rest of them are eccentric. Some are complete basket cases, and some are completely psycho. It’s not very easy to deal with them. In fact, it is in such situations you need to “strategize” your dealings with these people if you want to come out of this place sane. But of course, sometimes nothing works with them and you just learn to live with it.

I’ve never been more uncomfortable in my life before. I did spend four years in a hostel during engineering and there were difficult people, and not once did I feel uncomfortable. But here, at MDI, it’s a whole new world. You feel the discomfort tugging at you every moment of every day, and all you wish for is to get done with the course and run away as fast and as far as possible.

But in the light of all the reading and understanding of fields other than management, I’ve learnt to look at it from a larger perspective. If not for generating revenue, or helping the economy grow, or improving the standards of living of people economically, to say the very least, it’s an interesting insight into human behaviour and the application of this insight into conducting business transactions with people. And for that alone, I am glad I’m here.

And of course, no need to mention, the wonderful friends I’ve made here, and some very interesting people I’ve met.